Gerrit Cole’s Yankees legacy start all caved in during blunder-filled fifth inning: ‘Bad as it gets’
Gerrit Cole was cruising. The Yankees bats had come alive. It was 5-0 after four innings and the Dodgers didn’t have a hit.
The World Series felt destined for Friday night in Los Angeles.
Then it all came crashing down for the reigning American League Cy Young award winner. Defense played a major part, including his own failure to cover first base, but Cole also couldn’t put away Freddie Freeman and Teoscar Hernandez in a big spot.
While he left with the Yankees up a run with two outs in the seventh inning, Cole flushed a five-run lead in their season-ending, 7-6 loss to the Dodgers at the Stadium on Wednesday night.
“This is as bad as it gets,” Cole said. “It’s the worst feeling you can have. … It’s just brutal.”
Cole delivered his second-longest outing of the postseason in his biggest start in pinstripes, going 6 ²/₃ innings without allowing an earned run, striking out six and walking four.
He retired six of the final seven Dodgers he faced, pulled after walking Freeman with two outs in the seventh.
But the Yankees needed Cole to pitch like an ace to send this World Series back to Los Angeles. Ultimately, he couldn’t avert that disastrous fifth inning, in part because of his own miscue.
While errors by Aaron Judge and Anthony Volpe on back-to-back plays enabled the Dodgers to load the bases with no outs, Cole was within one out of getting out of the jam after striking out Gavin Lux and Shohei Ohtani.
Cole, however, failed to cover first base on a Mookie Betts roller to Anthony Rizzo, allowing the Dodgers’ first run to score.
Cole said afterward that he misread the spin on the ball, thinking he could field it and took a poor angle.
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“I just didn’t know how hard he hit it and by the time the ball got by me, I was not in a position to cover first,” he said. “Neither of us were based on the spin of the baseball and [Rizzo] having to secure it. Just a bad read off the bat.”
Cole couldn’t finish off either Freeman or Hernandez, allowing two-strike hits to both that enabled the Dodgers to get even at 5-5.
Freeman got to a 99-mph fastball that caught too much of the plate and laced it to center field to score two runs.
Hernandez smoked a slider that Cole didn’t get far enough away, driving in two more runs.
“I gave it everything I had,” he said.
To Cole’s credit, he responded to that five-run fifth by shutting down the Dodgers from there.
That’s where Cole found his best, retiring six in a row after a walk to Max Muncy.
He threw 108 pitches, his most in a game all year. He didn’t tire late due to the high pitch count. He unloaded the tank in what was almost certainly going to be his 2024 swan song on the mound — even if the Yanks had extended the series.
“I just thought he controlled the moment and the evening so very well,” manager Aaron Boone said. “Obviously, he got in a tough situation in that fifth inning and handled it so well. I don’t know how many pitches he had to throw to get out of it. I know it was a lot. And then to still be able to go back out there and give us another good inning in the sixth and be able to go out there for a few more batters in the seventh, I thought he was brilliant.”
It was a strange year for Cole.
He didn’t make his first start until June 19 due to elbow troubles.
He was up and down when on the mound, pitching to a 3.41 ERA while his workload was closely monitored.
His first start of the playoffs was shaky, a four-run effort over five innings against the Royals.
But over his last four outings, he held the opposition to four earned runs over 24 innings.
Still, there was that fifth inning. The Freeman and Hernandez at-bats.
Cole couldn’t make the five-run lead stand up. The Yankees are going home.
